Raspberry Pi’s $35 Linux computer on track to launch later this month

You'll soon be able to get your mitts on one.

The first model of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's low-cost Linux computer will likely be available for purchase later this month. The organization announced today that manufacturing on the first batch is set to complete on February 20.

The $35 computer, which is a bare board the size of a deck of playing cards, has a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. A second model with lower specs will eventually be released for $25. According to a statement issued today by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the $35 model will probably be available for purchase by the end of the month unless there are additional production delays.

We reported on the Raspberry Pi computer last month when manufacturing was set to begin. Completion of the first batch was delayed because the manufacturer had difficulty sourcing a component. The issue was resolved and production resumed.

In addition to announcing the expected ate of completion for the first batch, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has also announced the availability of technical documentation from Broadcom with details about the SoC used in the Raspberry Pi board. The document is available for download as a PDF file.

Im willing to pay 75 dollars for ARM V7 class cpu at 1Ghz with the same gpu as in the 35 dollar board plus make the board with slots for desktop or sodimm memory so we can put in our own memory and not be limited to whats on the board.

Im willing to pay 75 dollars for ARM V7 class cpu at 1Ghz with the same gpu as in the 35 dollar board plus make the board with slots for desktop or sodimm memory so we can put in our own memory and not be limited to whats on the board.

I'm curious what additional cooling and power requirements that would involve. I'm also curious what the practical cost difference would be for such an upgrade. You'd save on a RAM chip, but have to pay for a SODIMM.

Im willing to pay 75 dollars for ARM V7 class cpu at 1Ghz with the same gpu as in the 35 dollar board plus make the board with slots for desktop or sodimm memory so we can put in our own memory and not be limited to whats on the board.

That's not how ARM is designed... it'll get there eventually though. If you want power efficiency and potency, look at AMD's Fusion processors. The llanos are pretty awesome, and the trinity's will be another step up.

How come this article states the board is going for $35? It says "An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. Take a byte!". Any comment?

The tag line on their site is a little misleading.

They've specced out 2 versions, called Model A and Model B. From their FAQ "Model A has 128Mb of RAM, one USB port and no Ethernet (network connection). Model B has 256Mb RAM, 2 USB port and an Ethernet port".

It helps if you understand that the Raspberry Pi project is designed for educational establishments to get kids back in to the technical side of IT (hardware/programming) rather than the current curriculum which is basically leaning to use Ms Office. The early BBC computer project as well as the efforts of Clive Sinclair allowed kids to get their hands on cheap computers through schools and in order to use them they had to learn how to program them this created a pool of talent in the UK. The foundation is hoping the Pi will be a similar tool, and the government (shockingly) seems to agree.

The $25 Model A unit is designed for schools, Model B sales will help support the foundations goals by promoting the hardware to the open source community.

How come this article states the board is going for $35? It says "An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. Take a byte!". Any comment?

The tag line on their site is a little misleading.

They've specced out 2 versions, called Model A and Model B. From their FAQ "Model A has 128Mb of RAM, one USB port and no Ethernet (network connection). Model B has 256Mb RAM, 2 USB port and an Ethernet port".

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTA1MTc"The GPU itself is able to handle hardware decoding for H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1, AVS, and MJPG. There is vector-accelerated-but-otherwise-software-decode for VP6, VP7, VP8, RV, Theora, and WMV9. The VideoCore IV is said to be able to support 1080p encode and decode. It would be interesting if the video acceleration on the Raspberry Pi was exposed through VA-API or VDPAU, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

The only open-source part of the graphics stack is the kernel driver itself, which again isn't too different from the other ARM SoC vendors. Unfortunately this open-source kernel driver is not part of the mainline Linux kernel "

To make a complete computer usable by a kid with the Raspberry-Pi, you still need to add a sun-readable screen, a big battery, a waterproof keyboard and an enclosure designed to resist rough handling.That's not cheap, let me tell you.

To make a complete computer usable by a kid with the Raspberry-Pi, you still need to add a sun-readable screen, a big battery, a waterproof keyboard and an enclosure designed to resist rough handling.That's not cheap, let me tell you.

Yeah, the headline is misleading. Calling this a "computer" is a stretch from most people's #1 definition of a computer.

To make a complete computer usable by a kid with the Raspberry-Pi, you still need to add a sun-readable screen, a big battery, a waterproof keyboard and an enclosure designed to resist rough handling.That's not cheap, let me tell you.

Yeah, the headline is misleading. Calling this a "computer" is a stretch from most people's #1 definition of a computer.

If it's not a computer, then what on earth is it? Are these not computers? :S

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTA1MTc"The GPU itself is able to handle hardware decoding for H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1, AVS, and MJPG. There is vector-accelerated-but-otherwise-software-decode for VP6, VP7, VP8, RV, Theora, and WMV9. The VideoCore IV is said to be able to support 1080p encode and decode. It would be interesting if the video acceleration on the Raspberry Pi was exposed through VA-API or VDPAU, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

The only open-source part of the graphics stack is the kernel driver itself, which again isn't too different from the other ARM SoC vendors. Unfortunately this open-source kernel driver is not part of the mainline Linux kernel "

Yeah I'm not too thrilled about the binary blob either, but it's good to know that the GPU is capable of hardware decoding all those formats. What I'm most interested in, though, is how it handles 1080i deinterlacing.

I currently have an Atom 330 based MythTV server backend with 2 NVidia ION frontends for playback. I chose the VDPAU 'medium' or 'normal' (don't remember which) deinterlace settings and kicked up the number of cores from 1 to 4. Hardware accelerated video playback is flawless, so I'm really curious as to how the Pi will standup.

I'll definitely be getting a Pi eventually (not sure if I'll be able to get one of the first batch - they're gonna go fast), but my primary use out of the box would be for 1080i playback, and I've yet to see any stats on that particular use case. I guess worst case scenario, I could use it as a transcoding, dlna, and upnp server, right?

They have working OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenVG, EGL, and OpenMAX IL (no standard right now, so custom) implementations (see Libraries, codecs, OSS for the full info). I'm not sure if they plan on supporting a VA-API or VDPAU implementation - I haven't seen any mention of this on their website.

I can't wait. I'm itching to throw XBMC on one and just velcro it to the back of my TV.

It's a nice bit of kit, but they are only licensing a sub-set of the available codec on the SoC (for now). So it's not a killer compared to Apple TV, Boxee or Roku. But if you don't need to support a wide variety of formats or care about Netflix or Flash based streaming, it's a great device.